Social Media

HOW TO: Utilize Social Data More Effectively

Nate Elliott is Vice President and Principal Analyst at Forrester Research, where he helps interactive marketers around the world develop the strategies and tactics that make them successful, and then helps them measure the results. You can follow him on Twitter at @nate_elliott.

Last year, American consumers posted more than a billion opinions about products and services online, according to data collected by my company. With peer influence playing such a prominent role in consumers’ purchase decisions, it’s no surprise many interactive marketers are tapping into that influence via viral marketing programs and influencer outreach.

However, the vast majority of marketers ignore the staggering volume of social data all this influence creates. And those who do study social data typically use it for the wrong reason: to measure the brand impact of their marketing campaigns.

Social Data Is Often Based On Small Sample Sizes

With so many opinions posted online, you might assume it would be easy to find a reliable sample of data to analyze for brand impact. But even popular consumer brands often find it difficult to collect usable social data.

For instance, I recently reviewed a listening report for a global sporting goods brand — one that sponsors leading teams and athletes around the world and has strong brand awareness. I was surprised to see that the brand was mentioned in social media only a few hundred times each week in the U.S., and less than 100 times each week in other key markets around the world.

To make matters worse, the low quality of many social sentiment analysis tools reduces sample sizes further. When listening tools can’t decide whether comments are positive or negative, they’re usually labeled as having “no sentiment.” Three-quarters of the mentions for this brand were tagged as such, leaving less than two-dozen weekly usable posts in some markets.

If you asked your market insights team or your survey provider to analyze 25 consumer survey responses, they’d tell you it’s impossible to find statistical significance in such a small sample. The same standards must be applied to social data as well.

Social Creators Aren’t Necessarily Representative of Your Audience

Although most online users today engage with social media, that doesn’t mean the consumers who post social content offer a representative sample. In fact, 20-year-olds are twice as likely as 40-year-olds to be what my company calls “conversationalists” — people who post status updates on Facebook or Twitter. And they’re three times as likely to be what we call “creators” — people who post blogs or videos online.

If you’re marketing a product targeted primarily to younger consumers, you might find that the people posting in social media look something like your audience. But for many marketers, that’s simply not the case.

Social Data Usually Measures Extremes

Ever notice that most online reviews are either very positive or very negative? It’s not your imagination. Our data shows that most social influence posts are extreme in nature – and it happens for two reasons.

First, consumers are simply more motivated to post opinions online if those opinions are strong. If I don’t have a strong opinion, I probably won’t take the time. That’s why nearly three-quarters of customer ratings on Amazon’s ten best-selling books are either 1's or 5's, and why very few reviews fall in between those extremes.

Second, so many posts about products and services are driven by individual experiences that they’re bound to be polarized in nature. If I waited in line at the bank for 20 minutes, I may fill the time telling Twitter that I hate my bank. Conversely if I get a free upgrade on my flight, I might post about how much I love my airline. Perhaps these are useful customer service data points (and they definitely influence other consumers), but they’re not a reliable gauge of overall sentiment towards your brand or campaign.

Valuable Ways for Marketers To Use Social Data

So if you shouldn’t use social data to measure brand impact, what is it good for?

Lots of things. Whether you or your company works directly with social media or not, you should be using social data right now to:

Develop your messaging. If you want to create messages that resonate with your audience, you need to know what it cares about. For instance, companies are using private listening communities to craft their marketing messages. And increasingly, companies are using data from public social media as an additional marketing guide.

Source your creative. We know that consumers trust what they hear from other consumers more than any other source of information. So why not use listening platforms to identify positive social content that can be included in campaign creative? I've even seen UK bank First Direct use social sentiment data in an outdoor advertising campaign.

Improve your media plan. You probably already have a few staples in your online media plan — the sites and networks that consistently perform for you. But social data can help you find new sites to add to your buy. For instance, when Microsoft found that people were talking about its computers in forums dedicated to fishing and cars, it quickly added those sites to its plan.

Identify your key influencers. According to our studies, consumers in the U.S. create more than 500 billion peer-to-peer impressions about brands and products per year. Social data can help you identify (and then reach out to) the most vocal and influential of those consumers, either individually or by finding the forums in which your brand will have the most influence.

React to your consumers. You can't fuel a positive conversation about your products (or get involved in a negative one) unless you find those conversations first. Listening platforms can help you quickly find both the good and the bad so you're in a position to react.

The key here is to successfully build social data into marketing programs – and not to use it, like most companies, as a tool to measure those programs.

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